Patterns of Swallows (33 page)

But now she had to know.

She unbuttoned her nightgown and
slid it off her shoulders, propping herself up on her elbows. Then,
cautiously, because the wound was still extremely tender when
brushed, she peeled back the dressings and gazed on a sight that
caused her mind to revolt.

It wasn't just the ugly
reddish-purple line or the unsightly stitches. It was the
freakishness of it. It wasn't her at all. This new body couldn't be
hers. On the one side, the breast – young, firm, full, and
rounded. And on the other side ... the other side, looking as it
looked.

Of course there were aids –
contraptions – for women like her, designed to disguise her
condition from the general public. Her mother-in-law had already
purchased one for her. But contraptions wouldn't work for the one
person who mattered.

It was over. Even if Graham
came back to his senses and came back to her, he'd leave again as
soon as he saw her like this.

She could envision the horror
and repulsion – horror and repulsion against his will –
that would cross his face. He'd never be able to touch her again.

She knew Graham well enough to
know that the beauty of a well-formed heart and spirit couldn't
compete with the beauty of a well-formed face and body.

It seems to every woman at some
point in her life that a woman is nothing without her beauty –
that her very womanness is tied up in her beauty.

In that instant, she felt the
urge to give in overpowering her.

All her life, she'd fought it.
But now, she could become a person like her mother if she chose.

How strange it is that
bitterness can be tempting! How odd it is that there are desires in
us, beckoning to us to give up on life and hope and happiness and
give in to the process that will warp our souls into gnarled, twisted
things. Of all the evil passions and desires, the desire for hatred
is surely the strangest. The leaning toward wallowing in illicit
pleasure is at least understandable. The leaning toward wallowing in
illicit pain is mysterious.

But whatever the reason for the
temptation, the fight against it is wearying, and for Ruth, it had
become exhausting.

She could feel herself giving
in. She had no will to fight anymore. She knew if she couldn't find
the will to fight, the newly-introduced ugliness of body would seep
inward into her soul. But she looked deep inside herself and could
find no will to fight. It had all been too much.

Of course
Daddy left Mother,
she said to herself, the bitterness already gaining a foothold.
Even
before he left, she was already this person. Her poison drove him
away. It drove everyone away; everyone but me. And now I'll become
her because I have no will left to fight it. She brought her
aloneness on herself. But I haven't. I haven't deserved it. I
haven't deserved any of it. It's just NOT FAIR!

The quiet voice inside her mind,
always calm in the eye of every storm, the one that never would mind
its own business (or perhaps always minded its own business), spoke
into her thoughts.

She had a choice. It came to
her very clearly. She could choose death, or she could choose life.
If she gave in to the true cancer that threatened her true life –
if she let it eat away at her from the inside like the worms who ate
the king of old – she knew she'd be just as dead as he was,
even while she walked and talked and breathed and went about her
empty days. She saw it clearly, and seeing it as clearly as she saw
it, she could only choose life. And so she did.

"Oh,
GOD
!"
she screamed.

The glass of water beside her
bed she took and threw with all her strength at the closed bedroom
door before she was even aware it was in her head to do such a thing.

I have no strength left.
There's nothing left in me that can fight. I barely have strength to
cry for help.

"Oh God!" she said
again but in a small voice.

That's all the strength you
need. The cry for help is what I've been waiting for.

It was so clear it may as well
have been audible.

Yet Ruth felt nothing. She
didn't feel a release. All she felt was anger and rebellion. Yet,
despite her feelings, her choice had been made. Like a plant on a
windowsill, her will turned toward the sunshine.

The door opened cautiously.

Mom's worried face came around
it.

"Ruth, what happened? I
thought you'd fallen. I heard a crash, and I thought I heard you
call out."

"I threw the glass of water
at the door. And I got mad at God and screamed at Him. Don't step
on the broken glass. I'll sweep it up when I get up," Ruth said
matter-of-factly.

Mrs. MacKellum often had a hard
time knowing what to say to her daughter-in-law.

She settled on, "I've
brought breakfast for you."

Ruth sat up and started to eat.
She was surprised to find she could. She was startled to learn she
could still feel hunger, but hungry she was.

Mom watched her closely, the
concerned look still on her face. Ruth had to laugh at the wary eye
Mom cast on her.

"The eggs are very good,
thank you. You don't have to stay. I'm all right now." Ruth
couldn't understand why, but it was suddenly true. There was a
calmness inside she hadn't felt in months. Maybe it was a result of
the outburst.

"If you're sure ..."

"I'm sure."

"If I can bring you
anything else ..."

"No, this is fine, thank
you."

Mom cleaned up the broken glass
while Ruth ate. She was nearly out of the room when Ruth said ...

"Mom!"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I mean it. You're one of
the kindest people I've ever known."

Mom smiled at her, and Ruth's
eyes welled up. It wasn't like her at all. She wasn't a crier.
Even when she was a child, she cried seldom. She hadn't cried when
her father had left or when Graham had left. Why should she cry now
just because someone showed her a bit of tenderness?

You're not
in this alone
,
the quiet voice said.

I know
,
she answered it.
Mom
is a gift
.

I'll never
leave you nor forsake you
,
the voice spoke back.

When she finished breakfast,
Ruth felt as if she could sleep a little more. So she did.

*
* *

Two nights later, as Mom made
her way to the bathroom late at night, from behind Ruth's bedroom
door she could hear painful gasps like the desperate attempts for air
of a drowning person.

Mom tapped lightly on the door.

"Ruth, can I come in?"

There was no answer, only
another of the horrible drowning noises.

Mom went in.

Ruth was sitting up in bed with
her knees pulled to her chest, rocking back and forth and sobbing in
a manner that Mom had never before heard, even from a child. It
seemed to her that twenty-three years of stored-up tears had finally
breached the dam and poured forth in an unstoppable torrent.

"Ruth!" Mom went to
her and sat on the bed holding her, trying to calm the wracking sobs
so Ruth could at least catch her breath.

"It hurts. It hurts,"
was all Ruth could manage between gasps.

"The incision?" Mom
said, alarmed, jumping up, ready to go to the phone immediately.

"I ... hurt ... in ...
side!" she forced out.

"Under the incision?"
Mom asked, still not understanding.

"My ... heart ... hurts."

Mom rocked her back and forth
and made little shushing noises. The privilege of doing so was
unutterably sweet. Yet it was unutterably painful to witness Ruth's
pain.

"I ... wasn't ... enough
... for him," Ruth gasped out.

"I ... feel ... like I'm
... not worth ... anything. I feel ... worthless," The last
word rose into a keening wail.

"You mustn't tell yourself
such things. You mustn't believe that even for a moment," Mom
said sternly.

"He ... doesn't ... love
... me. I wasn't ... good enough!"

Mom had nothing to say. Her
position was a terrible one. Her anger at that moment toward the son
of her womb and of her heart was white hot and terrifying.

Eventually, Ruth exhausted the
sobs and lay in a bundle on the bed, drawing shuddering breaths.

"I just had to get that out
of my system. I'll be all right now," she said at last. "I
think I can sleep. Go back to bed."

Mom kissed her forehead and
silently left the room with the sensation of an enormous rending.
There would be no more sleep for her that night.

"Would
you like to come to church with me this morning, Ruth?" her
mother-in-law asked her tentatively. Since Ruth's demonstration of
grief, she'd felt helpless. She knew Ruth needed more support than
she could give her.

Yet
she knew that Graham scorned church-attendance. In casual
conversation with Ruth upon one occasion, the subject of church-going
had arisen, and Ruth had mentioned that her mother had also been
opposed. For these reasons, Mrs. MacKellum shied away from asking
Ruth to join her in her faithful, weekly attendance, imagining Ruth
to share her mother's and her husband's antipathy.

To
her surprise, Ruth accepted at once. But if Mrs. MacKellum had known
what she was letting herself in for by asking Ruth to church, she
might have thought twice.

*
* *

The
congregational singing was uninspired, the choral singing was sharp,
and the piano was flat.

Looking
around at the well-scrubbed, well-fed, well-dressed Arrowhead upper
class that filled most of the pews, singing familiarly (albeit
joylessly) a hymn she'd never heard before, Ruth felt like the only
uninitiate in a meeting of an old fraternity.

Ruth
couldn't decide if she regretted her decision to come or not. She'd
accepted in a moment of an awareness of sharp and almost painful
yearning. But that moment of awareness had been replaced by sinking
doubt. Would she find anything here but stale crusts of
companionship and fellowship?

Reverend
Harper's text was found in Isaiah 53. Ruth knew the passage well.
She found the frail pages quickly in the aged, fragile Bible from
which her mother had read to her every day in her childhood and which
she had read to herself nearly every day since.

Time
for a new one,
she thought as she always did every time she opened its frayed cover.
But something about its very age aroused in her a resistance against
replacing it. It was an old friend.

She
forgot for a moment about the seemingly-lifeless congregation
surrounding her and closed her eyes, tears squeezing under her
eyelids (once the dam had been breached, the water flowed freely at
any opportune or inopportune time), to listen to the soporific tones
of Rev. Harper reading the ancient and beautiful words.

Who
hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD
revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as
a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we
shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is
despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and
we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried
our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and
afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised
for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and
with his stripes we are healed.

Ruth's
attention wandered in and out of the sermon, held more by the words
on the page of the old Bible than by what the preacher had to say
about them. Or by what the preacher had to say. With wandering
attention, she couldn't be entirely sure the preacher's words had any
connection to the words of Isaiah. The gist of the sermon seemed to
be the evils of that new music (if one could call it music. Rev.
Harper took issue with the term). Rock and roll. The devil and
Elvis Presley's music (but perhaps the two were one and the same to
read between Rev. Harper's lines). From there, the sermon marched
bravely into, what Ruth presumed to be, well-trodden territory: all
the numerous vices that would fall under the general heading of
"Other iniquities" – dancing, cinema-going,
card-playing.